Listen: The Awesomely Low-Tech, Mouth-Made Videogame Soundtrack

When Amanita Design released Botanicula earlier this year, fans knew the game was going to be good. The indie game-maker had a track record; in 2009 they released a point-and-click puzzle game called Machinarium that won them heaps of awards and a dedicated fan base. Botanicula’s early art was promising — a cross between an avant-garde kids book and indie band cover art — but what ultimately pushed it over the edge were its noises, created by the Czech band DVA.

How does a soundtrack elevate an already great game? Let’s start with the setup. DVA was approached by Amanita Design three years ago to create both the sound effects and the music for Botanicula, a game in which a tree is infested with evil parasites and five woodland creatures attempt to save it.

The band had worked with Jára Plachý, the project’s lead animator, on another project a few years prior. Plachý liked DVA, and asked if they would produce music for his game in exchange for some video work. The band agreed. The first collaboration went well, so when Plachý signed on with Amanita and started a new game, he asked DVA’s Bára Kratochvílová and Jan Kratochvíl to sign on again — this time for pay.

Since Botanicula exists mostly in a tree, the duo first thought, “Hey, maybe we can do it with sounds from real nature,” says Jan, whose parents own a house in the mountains where the band spends quite a bit of time. “We had a Dictaphone, and there are many sounds of birds and flies.” It was all going well until they got to the one thing on their list a little trickier to capture: the mosquito.

When they started working on the project in February 2011, there were none of the pests to be found. It was a potentially project-threatening problem. But DVA found an innovative DIY solution that ended up making the game. The duo essentially set up their own Foley studio (a soundstage where artists mimic everyday sounds for use in filmmaking) to handle post production in the mountains, producing anything they couldn’t net in the wild with what was available — their mouths.

The result is immediately personal and super likeable. When they needed an automobile sound, DVA produced a gutteral bidim bim bim bim bidim bim like the sound the tail pipe makes on a cartoon car. Need a bug flitting its wings? How about a long, sustained fthththththt like a fly buzzing too close to your ear.

While many of these mouth-made sounds they spit out intentionally, others occurred purely by accident. In the game, “there’s a hole in the tree with a mouse, and I really didn’t know what I could record there,” says Jan. “Nothing seemed to fit.” So he put it aside and started working on something else. “Once I left my microphone on and I started to sing, umpbudumbudum. It all fit!”

Overall, about 20 percent of the game’s noises were recorded in the field and the rest were produced by by the musicians. “Bara is a specialist in these noises,” Jan laughs.

And to think the whole thing started as a potentially project-exploding bug (the buzzing kind). Instead, the band’s resourcefulness resulted in a one-of-a-kind game with a soundtrack worth paying for.